Skinner & T'witch

For Skinner & T’witch the folk club bait promised ‘folk, flamenco and theatre style songs, with driving rhythms, intense harmonies and inspiring lyrics’, an enticement so accurate that I can find no paragraph of the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 contravened. There was fancy flamenco guitar thrumming; there was folk; delivery had a notably theatrical leaning; rhythms drove; harmonies twitched the intensometer and lyrics did inspire.

Offering some context to their work, Steve Skinner references Flanders and Swann, Jake Thackray and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. We’re in for a treat then!

Skinner is a studied song crafter, fine guitarist and singer, T’witch, aka Sandra Twitchett possesses a beautiful voice, classically trained and, boy, it shows.

The first thing that strikes are the vocal arrangements, there are some beautifully crafted counterpoint parts… most impressive. The second thing that strikes is the honed, nay, scripted nature of the evening - banter between performers, asides to the audience, punchline timings right down, even, to the raise of an eyebrow, we could almost be sitting in a BBC studio for a Radio Four comedy recording.

The material falls broadly into two camps – serious and comic, the pre-interval half leaning towards the serious with more comic stuff post-interval.

And the serious songs are very beautiful. ‘Queen of the Ocean’ paints a wistful tale of a woman who works in a seafood shack. Skinner manages to fit 14 different types of seafood into the song! ‘How Can I Compare Thee’ blossoms beautifully from a Shakespearean wild flower meadow. ‘King of the River’ sparkles with poetic grace… “I am the King of the river My crown milky white, spinning round My dreams peaty brown from the earth’ Highly effective was ‘Blackwater Side’, a trad tune which Skinner learned from Bert Jansch and T’witch learned from Led Zeppelin’s ‘Black Mountain Side’. Incidentally Zeppelin filched, without credit, Jansch’s guitar arrangement to pass off as their own ‘Black Mountain Side’. A bit naughty. No surprise there though, Zeppelin did quite a bit of upcycling of other people’s material for their own ends.

And for the comic stuff. ‘Everybody’s Grotty’ pokes holes in celebrity perfection to remind us of our material grot. It’s schoolboyish but S&T manage to get us to sing along. ‘Back to the Bills’ is clever, holiday perfection, the carefree idyll of ‘being away’, but then it’s back to the bills.

No one is safe in the last song of the set, a multi-faceted folky parody. For example, the Everly Brothers’ ‘All I Have to do is Dream’ is repurposed as Cream, Cream, Cream a paen to Nivea. Joan Baez’s ‘Donna Donna’ finds itself praising a night out in Leeds with the joy of a late-night kebab. You get the picture.

So, again a very different night for the folk club. I’d recommend listening to Skinner & T’witch, they definitely have their own thing goin’ on - they’re not like everyone else. Oh, and if you weren’t there on Thursday - as we say up here – ye missed yersel.

Words and pictures by Callum MacLeod